Artificial Intelligence is Not Killing Jobs

Narrative Science, a leader in advanced natural language generation for the enterprise, published their 2015 State of Artificial Intelligence & Big Data in the Enterprise Report. The report includes a survey and analysis revealing numerous insights into how all levels of employees, from executive leadership to data scientists to managers, view artificial intelligence (AI) and how they use it in conjunction with Big Data in their organizations.

Many salient findings came to light and several confirmed what true attitudes and beliefs towards AI are. One of the most interesting was that respondents are positive about the impact it will have, with 80 percent reporting that AI-powered technologies creates jobs and improve worker performance and efficiency, while only 15 percent believe that AI eliminates jobs. The results of the report are summarized in the infographic below:

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Recently Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, among others, signed an open letter that addressed AI research and outlined steps to take to ensure that AI doesn’t eventually overtake humans as it develops. The fear of artificial intelligence taking over the world and suppressing humankind has long been stuff of science fiction from I, Robot, to the Terminator, to the Matrix, we’ve been worried about the robot uprising.

Surprisingly then, when faced with real AI and its impact on our lives, people feel pretty good about it – at least in some sectors. Those working in Enterprise level companies were surveyed for this article. But it is telling that the range of “workers” that they spoke with are all white collar from “executive leadership to data scientists to managers” with all of them giving an enthusiastic thumbs up to using AI for analytics. Responses from consumers, whose data is being mined and analyzed, were not included in this summation. Overall, it reads like a propaganda piece for “big data” which isn’t surprising given the website.

Actual AI and machine learning practitioners (including myself) giggle when we read the AI-fear declarations from luminaries like Hawking and Musk. It would be like me writing a manifesto about the evils of mutant black holes forming and swallowing up the observable universe. These people, as revered as they are, don’t know much about AI and yet they feel justified in making these public statements. Probably one of the most highly respected AI, machine learning and deep learning specialists in he world, Professor Andrew Ng of Stanford, has also spoken out on this trend. Fanciful conjecture at its best.

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